There is something strikingly similar about the situation of Israel as seen through the book of Exodus and that of Israel as seen through Matthew’s Gospel. In Egypt, the Israelites were making bricks and mortar and working in the fields. The ground had been cursed because of Adam, but the Israelites had left their work of raising livestock and were working in the fields and making bricks. The people who gathered long ago in the land of Shinar said, “Come, let’s bake bricks and build a tower whose top is in the heavens.” They made bricks with their own hands and wanted to use them to build a tower whose top would reach to the sky. (see Genesis 11:1-4) This incident of the tower of Babel presents us with an image of man’s heart when it becomes arrogant. This was the situation of the Israelites.
Such were the times in which Moses was born. At that time, the Israelites, who had been living a life of bondage in Egypt, had given birth to large numbers of children and so the pharaoh commanded that if any of the Hebrew women gave birth to a male child, the child was to be cast into the river. Similarly, when the wise men from the east came to the land of Israel and asked, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him,” King Herod, upon hearing these words and on the basis of the time the star appeared, ordered the killing of all the male children of two years old and younger in Bethlehem and its districts. Nevertheless, Jesus was born into this world, just as Moses was also born into this world. Images appear in the Old Testament like shadows.
Moses’ parents put him in a basket of bulrushes and laid it in the reeds by the riverbank. The pharaoh’s daughter found the basket of bulrushes and Moses grew up as a prince of Egypt. Nevertheless, it was Moses true mother who nursed him, taught him to speak, and gave him an education. She was brought in as a wet-nurse and raised him.
One day when Moses was about forty years old, he went out to see the Israelites about whom he had heard and been taught by his mother. When he saw an Egyptian beating one of the Israelites, he attacked and killed the Egyptian. Then the next day, he saw two Israelites fighting with one another. When he tried to stop them fighting, one of them said, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you intend to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”. Realizing that what he had done was no secret, he fled to the land of Midian, and there he spent forty years.
Then one day when Moses was about eighty years old, the Angel of the Lord suddenly appeared before him in the midst of a burning bush. God said to him, “I will send you to the land of Egypt to bring my people, Israel, out of there.” So Moses asked how he should introduce God to the people, and God said he should say, “I AM has sent me to you.” God referred to Himself saying, “I AM WHO I AM.” Then God said, “I am the Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.”
Let’s turn to Exodus chapter 3.
Then Moses said to God, “Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they say to me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?” And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And He said, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” verses 13-14
In the book of Ecclesiastes it says, “For who knows what is good for man in life, all the days of his vain life which he passes like a shadow? Who can tell a man w
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